What are directions in Alexander Technique?

The Alexander technique has two core skills that its practitioners learn: inhibition and direction¹. On the surface both of them are quite straight forward: as you learn them, you discover that they bring about change in how you relate to the world, yourself and others. That change is often experienced positively (yay!), because it gives a feeling of greater ease and increased agency. And to a certain extent, it’s like riding a bike. You don’t actually have to know about moments of inertia and the very complex physics of how a bike stays upright and how it turns left or right. You just do it and you ride your bike to wherever you want to go. With the Alexander Technique, the results are a bit less consistent. Some days, you are just massively unsuccessful (boo!) and you think “it must be because I don’t fundamentally understand this inhibiting and directing business”. And then, if you’re me, you think “I should figure out what this directing business actually is”. I’m not sure it’s all that useful (any more than knowing about moment of inertia in bike riding), but it can be reassuring. And if nothing else, it’s fun to think about.

For a more direct (haha!) explanation of directions, you can check out Henry’s blog post, intended for both students and practitioners.

Before we go explore what directing is, we have to take a detour around why I, personally, and right now (or at least at time of original drafting), am struggling to accept the simple answers, or at least feel the need to understand direction more deeply.

Direction, inhibition and psychophysical unity

My wondering about directing has been tied to my wondering about the link between the psycho- and the physical (part of the answer is obviously in psychophysical unity: they are two expressions of the same thing, maybe like the trunkness of the elephant is tied to its big-earedness and querying the specific link between them is not necessarily useful). On the other hand, inhibition seems so simple and obvious in it’s “psycho-physical-ness”: non-reacting/non-doing/de-escalation of unnecessary “escalatedness” in mind and body are quite similar. You “do less” with the mind and you “do less” with the body and both “doing lesses” feed into each other. They are quite symmetrical.

Direction on the other hand seems asymmetrical. We think “body thoughts” with our minds and something happens. Why? If the benefits of the technique were purely physical it would be a no brainer. The “weak” form of psychophysical unity would apply: your movement is obviously part of your neuro-muscular system, which obviously includes thought; or at least that part of thought that relates to movement.

Somehow the lengthening and widening and expanding that is manifest in the body is also a lengthening and widening and expanding of the mind. This is a quite symmetrical relationship, albeit a bit more metaphorical than the one for inhibition. But it’s more than that: just thinking spatially, thinking embodied thoughts, thinking directions helps us to de-escalate in the mind and affects what we are “able” to think. Why is that?

So for me, right now, asking what direction is asks several other questions: “what”, specifically are we directing? How does directing that affect our whole psychophysical self? Why are physical/spatial/embodied directions effective in directing the psychophysical self? It somehow seems helpful to consider all the possibilities rather than try to find the one true (or set of true) answers.

Directing the body (and its organisation)

A first set of explanations involves the idea that we are simply directing the body. And, the body being one extremity or aspect of the full psychophysical self, by directing the body we gently tug on that end, much like we might tug on the end of a ball of yarn.

The most plausible version of this to my mind is how I understand Alexander from his book the “Use of the Self”. We are noticing a general or specific tendency when presented with the desire to do something and we give preventative directions (or in Alexander’s words, preventative “orders”) to say “no” to that tendency. Don’t let the neck stiffen, don’t let the back narrow, don’t let the knees pull back and into the hips, etc. This kind of directing is related to inhibition and reaction: we know that our “doing less” will not be sustainable in a given activity (for example our neck will stiffen as we go about doing something complicated), so we anticipate that tendency by already “thinking about not doing that”, also known as “directing”

A close followup to that is that when we don’t do these things, we allow the primary control to take over. And the primary control both organises and comes out of the organisation of the parts of the body, so there are a series of directions that suggest, re-inforce and coax this organisation to emerge.

A more literal way of thinking that is maybe the primary control or maybe something slightly different is in the contrast between phasic and tonic muscles. We have some muscles that seem to clearly respond to direct volition: we want to move our arm and our arm moves. Others we can’t consciously “engage”. Directing might be the best thinking we can do to allow our body to bring online certain muscle groups that can’t be controlled volitionally. This is a bit akin to an orchestra conductor. They can’t play any of the individual instruments, but they can help bring them into coordination with the whole of the orchestra by conducting: thinking a certain organisation but not micromanaging how it is executed.

Alexander also distinguishes between primary directions, that are preventative, and secondary directions, that are organisational and seem to be about directing specific parts of the body in certain directions, engaging certain fascia lines and connections leading others to be diminished (presumably?).

If we are directing the body or parts of the body, we can wonder how we avoid the temptation to “do” those directions. What is the mechanism for interpretation of the words?

One of these is a very literal interpretation: “direction” takes on its “spatial” meaning, as well as its “instructional” meaning. From there, some teachers worry about what pupils in general (or a pupil in specific) might choose to understand. “Allow the neck to be free”. Do we need to understand exactly what is meant by “allow”, “the neck” and “be free” in order for these directions to be effective? Does the effectiveness of the directions improve with an understanding of anatomy? And maybe they do have to be “done” or “carried out” (or at least “thought out”) to the best of our ability - in that sense, the meaning we associate with “allow” would be really important, as we are not only thinking the words, but we are letting them affect us. In this sense, directions might be quite similar to what is often termed “cueing” in other somatic techniques: a set of thoughts that the teacher uses to guide a pupil through movement, bearing in mind that only a limited number of cues can be thought at any one time, so they need to be very effective.

Another interpretation (mentioned for example by Dr Barlow), is that the AT teacher shares with their hands an experience that provides meaning to the directions. So “let the neck be free” is associated with the experience - and presumably then recalling the direction should recall the experience².

Maybe the words have a meaning in the absolute (slightly separate from our construing of them), that we don’t need to particularly worry about, trusting the self to make sense of them as an aid to reorganisation. (I think this is what Alexander meant by “sending messages to the parts of the mechanism”?).

Some extremes of that interpretation might be that they are a mantra, to be repeated until something happens. Or (less negatively to my mind), they become a shortcut to “Alexander thinking”: We say to ourselves “think up” and trigger all the mind and body organisation we have learned from our lessons.

At the other extreme, Jeando Masuero and Penelope Easton describe how you need at least two directions to convey meaning of 3-dimensional movement. Jeando elaborates way further on this in his understanding of Alexander Technique in general and the role of orders within the technique. In particular, he elaborates on the necessity of sequence, as directions are given in preparation, one after the other, without doing them, and then carried out all together.

Directing inhibition and non-doing

Several of the above “body” interpretations (and upcoming interpretations) also interrelate with inhibition. As I’ve always found inhibition more intuitively accessible, I’ve often asked “what does directing get us that inhibition doesn’t?”. And I understand that other people (Robert Rickover mentions this in one of his podcasts) have felt more comfortable with direction, so they might have asked the converse: what does inhibition get us that direction does not?

In some ways, maybe directions are a shortcut, trigger, enhancer or maintainer of inhibition. As a shortcut, instead of sitting and inhibiting for 20mn, maybe thinking neck free etc. accelerates that process? As a trigger, maybe “think up” is a way of getting our inhibition going. As an enhancer, maybe inhibition gets us so far and direction can pull a little more stop out of us. As a maintainer, this again follows Alexander’s concept of “preventative orders”: they are means whereby we can keep the non-doing we have found as we move into activity. In this sense, they are an anti-“end gaining”.

Maybe directions are a neutral set of thoughts with which to replace our more do-y thinking? Maybe direction is what is left once we have inhibited everything else?

Directing our embodiment and presence

Part of my confusion around directions is that if we are directing the body, I can accept that it is “as simple as that”. But a lot of direction I’ve encountered fits into what I’ve heard described as “spatial thinking”, whether internal or external. Thinking about the space between our ears, the location of our atlanto-occipital joint, the space above our head, the colours and textures in the room. Why does that also work? In what way is it in the same category as the more classical directions?

Obvious answers might be embodiment or inhibition. By thinking spatial thoughts we are taking ourselves out of our “mind” and into our whole embodied self. Or by thinking spatial thoughts that are about “being”, we take ourselves out of doing.

The answer I’m most excited about has something to do with presence, “mindfulness”, grounding, “here and now”-ness. I see Alexander Technique as a way to engage with what really is and where we are within it. Rather than brace ahead of the meeting we are anxious about we can feel the support of the ground and the safety of not yet being in that meeting. Rather than worry about the conversation we just had, we can use spatial thinking to ground ourselves in the present moment, take stock of where we actually are, and move forward from there. Engaging with the material world is a way of finding newness, of improvising, rather than following the path of habit, expectation or anticipation.

There is a bit of a snag if this is taken too far (at least to my mind), which is that we are planning, anticipatory, imaginative creatures³ who can conceive of futures that will not come about unless we bring them into being - too much present moment might take away from that? Conversely, in that anticipation, the brain spends a tremendous proportion of time predicting into the future, elaborating the missing parts from incomplete fuzzy sensory information and acting like the predicted result is the reality. Directing into presence may slow down the rate of this predictivity so that it looks a bit less like reactivity.

More generally, as hinted in the introduction, thinking “spatially” might be exactly the kind of thinking needed to help bring about psychophysical unity, or the integration of the mind and body, as we give the mind “bodily thoughts”.

Directing our thinking

All our body thoughts, spatial thoughts and non-doing thoughts have something in common. They are obviously (and quite tritely) thoughts.

Some of our default thinking is made transparent by our language: “my back is giving me some trouble today”. It carries meaning for us that we can separate our experience of “my back” our from our more general experience of “myself”. So our thoughts have a tendency to fragment our experience into component parts such as “leg, belly, nervous system, emotions”, allowing us to have a degree of distance between “me” and “my experience” for the purposes of observation, description, or just not feeling overwhelmed by something “we” seem to have relatively little agency over. Dan Siegel describes “integration” (a fundamental aspect of healing and well-being) as being the “linkage of differentiated parts”. Our fragmenting mode of thinking does a reasonable job of differentiating, except it maybe does not consider the nuance between fragmentation and differentiation, particularly when it comes to linking the parts back together again.

The Alexander technique directions, through their physicality and through their description of organisation and relationship offer a mode of thinking that is simultaneously differentiating and linking.

Balancing the left and right brain hemispheres by directing our attention and awareness

Continuing on the theme of directing our thinking, one particular body of work I (and many other AT practitioners) have found exciting is McGilchrist’s work to summarise right brain vs left brain research.

He explains that the pop science explanations of the last 50 years are mostly inaccurate, stereotyping the left brain as being rational and practical and the right brain as being emotional and artistic. He posits that the left and right brain differentiation stems from the necessity to maintain two different kinds of attentions. The left brain attention is more focused and narrowed, concentrating on things that are “known” (such as food vs not food, where it’s better to exclude than include: eating something that is not food is bad); the right brain attention is more broad and all-encompassing, providing an awareness of things that are “unknown” (such as threats vs not threats, where it’s better to include than exclude: running away from something that is not a threat is fine).

More fundamentally, we end up with a left brain that is very focussed on the things it knows, the parts, the things that can be named and labeled and differentiated, but it has limited understanding that there are things it doesn’t know, that there is an emergent whole that it has no access to unless it is named and labeled for it. The right brain is more able to take in the whole, to discover the things it doesn’t know and to be comfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing. The right brain is quite concrete, concerned with the reality of the here and now. The left brain is a level of abstraction removed, replacing reality with a map that can be more or less accurate, more or less precise. Where the right brain has a focus on experiencing, the left brain can more purposefully think through actions and use tools in order to have a precise outcome. So the left brain has an ability to manipulate reality that the right brain does not.

McGilchrist goes on to see a cultural bias towards the left brain to have been a repeated occurence in the history of western thinking. The left brain thinking establishes an increasingly detailed, accurate and complex map of the world, giving it tremendous power to shape the things it understands, without quite recognising the limitations of a map: it can only represent what it represents and can only know what it it knows. Bluntly, it isn’t actually “reality”, even though it’s often a very accurate representation of it.

McGilchrist describes an ideal where the right brain delegates the left brain to understand or do on its behalf, expecting it to come back and coordinate before being sent out again. But as the left brain doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, it assumes that it doesn’t actually need to report back to the right brain and can just take over operations entirely. He goes on to suggest that we are in need of a rebalancing, but does not really suggest how it might be achieved.

The Alexander Technique, with its focus on balancing attention and awareness and its preference for thinking spatially could be hypothesised as “activating” the right hemisphere, bringing our brain out of its tendency to live in the left brain world of abstraction and into a more concrete here and now⁴. From this here and now, we are more likely to experience what is new and unknown in any given situation and less likely to jump down the path of our habits, revisiting only mapped out, familiar territory.

Directing our nervous system through co- and self-regulation

The autonomic nervous system can be thought of as the system that decides whether to spend or store/save energy. If thought of a as a single axis, the extent to which we are ready to mobilise energy is our level of arousal (here a technical term, not a synonym for “being turned on”). In face of a (perceived) threat or opportunity, we might find ourselves in high arousal: the heart beats faster, the breath is agitated, we’re ready to go into fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. In the face of (perceived) safety, we might go into a low arousal state, ready to digest, to store energy for the future, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated. In the face of (perceived) extreme threat, we might also go into a low arousal state, ready to shut down, to play dead and hope the threat will go away - another version of the parasympathetic nervous system.

Polyvagal theory⁵ suggests that the vagus nerve plays a large role in regulation of our arousal, differentiating between the two parasympathetic modes, and helping humans regulate their levels of arousal socially through co-regulation, and particularly helping us find a level of arousal that is appropriate to feeling safe and at ease within our community, and that turns out to be a good level of arousal from which to find integration (returning again to the linkage of differentiated parts), healing and creativity.

Anthony Kingsley and others have hypothesised that AT can be tied to the kind of co-regulation described in polyvagal theory. In this sense, direction is helping in bringing us to quiet, taking us off the ladder of escalation, but without falling into “slump”. Maybe finding the goldilocks level of arousal (thinking of it as a single axis), or some neutral point (thinking of it as a multi-dimensional and slightly unknowable spectrum), or some level that is appropriate to the moment (thinking of “how high should I float in the water, related to the bank or the shore?”).

Directing our brain

I’ve been learning more recently about developments in neuroscience. Four key points stick out for me that seem relevant to the topic of directions (and their “physicality”).

First, everything happens in the brain. Or at least in the extended brain that encompasses our nervous system and any other systems that provide input and output from the brain. For this reason, mind-body separation makes no sense, as the “body” we are aware of is all in the brain’s perceptions and the subsequent handling it makes of those perceptions. And while some parts of the brain may understand the localisation of perceptions as being interoceptive (some kind of information from inside our body), exteroceptive (somekind of information from outside our body) or other-sourced (a recent prediction the brain made, a memory that was considered relevant, etc.), to other parts of the brain this is just information, with any context that part of the brain deems irrelevant thrown away⁶. As both a blessing and a curse, at some point the brain locally doesn’t know whether it’s dealing with perception, memory, concepts, emotions, constructions or predictions. They are all the same thing.

Speaking of which, the brain is predictive, not reactive. It is constantly active, processing all of many inputs simultaneously, discarding information it deems useless and transducing into information that is “useful”: what is going to happen next? What should be done about it? What is the expected outcome of that action? In fact, because with each prediction to action comes the prediction of what will be perceived as a result of that action, most of our perception that we think of as “reality” is actually our predicted or constructed interpretation of reality. The closer our brain gets to successfully predicting what gets perceived next, the less we actually need to perceive it. This allows us to discard as redundant all new data that has already been predicted, vastly decreasing the amount of resources that need to be spent analysing known information for which we have already predicted and activated the “correct” response anyway.

Third, the body doesn’t just come in as a source of interoception and a means of exteroception. It’s also the common pathway to action, whether that action be movement of the musculo-skeletal system, generation of chemicals in the hormonal system, or signals to/by the autonomic nervous system. So in that sense, everything also happens in the body. All the outputs of the brain end up being “bodily”. The brain is a transducive system that takes inputs from the body, processes them and spits out the results in the body. In that sense, not only is thinking a form of movement (so when we think directions with our mind, they affect our body), but movement is a form of thinking (when we move, or change our posture, or pick something up, or increase our blood flow, there is no point at which we clearly have moved from “mind” to “body”).

Fourth and last, our brain is able to re-configure itself through neuroplasticity. When it makes predictions and the outcome is noticeably different, this is called a “prediction error”. Prediction errors help the brain figure out which of its current arrangements it should discard and which it should re-inforce. In adults, it also triggers a pre-cursor to this figuring out, which is making our brains neuroplastic in the first place (where a child brain is already bathing in neuroplasticity hormones, the adult brain needs to turn the neuroplasticity hormone tap on first by making prediction errors). So given an intention that can help us highlight prediction errors (e.g. I have the intention of throwing a basketball into a net, as opposed to just randomly throwing a basketball), the brain has all the necessary tools to reconfigure itself without additional assistance.

So from these key points, we can note some of the effects directions might have:

• they could help our brain not discard the 3d/spatial perceptory information because we keep making it relevant (by thinking it relevant) to more “parts” of the brain
• when our predictive abilities run away ahead of us, to the extent that we discard reality in favour of our hallucination of it, directions and spatiality can help us ground back into “reality” and help us notice prediction errors that might otherwise have been ignored
• our thinking is particularly tricky to observe. Directions circumvent “what should I observe about my thinking?” by leading us to notice the very first movement result, particularly the kinds of movement that lead to fixing, bracing, tightening or habit⁷
• directions provide an intention that we use to get out of our brain’s way so it can apply its usual neuroplasticity mechanisms, without “overthinking”
• further combining with neuroplasticity, our brain can reconfigure itself to make all the above happen more: discarding less of the sensory input, noticing more prediction errors, noticing more subtly the first part where our thinking becomes movement, and making more readily available states of being where we don’t try to micromanage our brain’s learning.

Directing relationship

One of my favourite ways to think of the Alexander Technique is that we are constructing an organisation of ourselves that is able to respond and rebalance continuously as various resources come in and out of relationship with us. As we sit on a chair, we can fully use the support it offers to our sitbones. As we come off the chair and into standing, the chair disappears and we get the support from the ground beneath our feet. At almost all times we are in relationship with gravity which to some extent is constant, but to another extent is ever changing as different tissues of our body become involved to varying degrees in the process of not collapsing into a pile of goo.

This extends beyond physics. We can stand and fold differently, knowing whether there is a chair behind us. We can learn that some support is metaphorically responsive in the way that the ground is reponsive: the more support we ask for, the more it will give: our back has a strength that we often don’t recognise; our friends, family, and sometimes complete strangers are willing to step up for us. Much in the same way that we have to allow ourselves to take up space in a trampoline for it to provide support, by allowing ourselves to exist and take up space in the world, we allow the world to make its support known to us.

Most of these relationships come with a risk: they might not be fully reliable, or they might be intermittent, or they might have their own agency and agenda, not providing exactly the support we expect them to provide. In some ways, the Alexander Technique is about discovering in each relationship, moment to moment, what kind of support it provides us, and finding out, in the sum of all our relationships, who we are, what we need, what is available, and the extent to which this is in constant flux.

In this sense, direction, is about bringing into clarity some of our relating: how we relate to ourselves, how different parts of ourselves organise and relate to each other, how we relate to gravity, and how we can allow these relationships to emerge moment to moment, rather than be fixed and pre-determined, while providing us with an overall feeling of safety.

Directing correctness

One of the maddening aspects of the Alexander Technique is whether there is a “right thing” or not. To some extent, the “right thing” is, as just discussed, to allow moment to moment emergence. So the “wrong thing” would be to have fixedness or pre-determinedness, or to bring about change in a micro-managed way. Going even further, the “wrong thing” is to believe there are “right and wrong things”, because this belief almost inevitably brings a fixedness or a micro-managing with it as we try to do or hold onto the “right thing”⁸.

For most of us (particularly, those who grew up in white/western culture?), no matter how much we trust in this conceptually, something about us says “yeah, but surely there is a little bit of ‘right’ here and there, how else do I know what to do and what not to do?”

Maybe directions are a way of leaning into this: accepting that we will always want some form of “rightness” that we can trust in, directions are ways of thinking something with a very strong intention that is the most universally “right” (it’s rarely, if ever “wrong” to think “head forward and up” - whatever that means). So directions are “correct” in both the senses of the word “direction”. They physical directions in space are good tendencies to have in most circumstances. And the kind of directing or ordering we are giving ourselves will tend to lead to non-doing rather than micromanaging or fixing.

Directing as a challenge

Conversely, maybe directing is useful because it adds a challenge that is not present in inhibiting.

When we ask ourselves to “do nothing”, there’s obviously nothing to be done. And this can tend towards collapsing (which we also come to understand as a kind of “doing” to not be done) or adding the tiniest bit of doing to make sure we are doing nothing (concretely, either a deliberate unravelling of specific parts, or a fixed stiffness, containing ourselves within the confines of an artificial quietness). The forms of doing that might misguidedly come about as we try to inhibit are pretty subtle, and we must become increasingly sensitive in order to work with them

When we direct, the direction carries in it a less subtle suggestion of doing, of gaining a specific end. So we find our inhibition challenged and get to say “no” to that suggestion. It also carries a return to the verbal and the left brain’s tendency to think in parts rather than wholes. Verbal also, by its nature, has to be sequential, suggesting that directions should happen one after the other rather than all together.

All these things come together in a way that has to be dealt with without doing, without compartmentalising, without focusing on the outcome at the expense of the process, allowing the gestalt of a whole across time and space to be held in our mind at the same time as some series of words that have a literal meaning.

Perhaps the words contained in directions actually serve as a subtle form of paradox or confusion, giving us the choice to grapple with meaning and make absolute sense of them, or instead to withhold definition (as Tommy Thompson would say), allowing for the sheer impossibility of literally “not doing anything” and simultaneously giving directions.

Does it matter?

Wow, this whole topic ended up being a mouthful (and over a year, off and on, in the writing)! Reading back through I find even my own eyes and mind glazing over as I see the dizzying array of words and metaphors that seem to just be seeking explanation for explanation’s sake, when the simple explanations of the first few sections might reasonably be enough.

Originally, I thought I was writing about this to clarify the various kinds of direction that exist. And the meaning (or lack thereof) of the words we use for directions. Emerging the other side of this though process, I’m less sure it really matters. Except in the limited range where it does:

• If we only use certain kinds of directions, maybe we miss out on some of the opportunities offered by the others. In particular if we don’t use the “classical” directions very much it seems like there might be a whole range of benefits that are missing to us
• If we want to keep our lessons interesting, to ourselves and to others, it might be beneficial to have a wide toolkit, not only of directions, but of paths and metaphors to use in sharing directions.

More importantly, I’m left with a sense of wonder at the variety of ways I can ponder (and through pondering, shape) my own experience. Where usually I would edit to make the language tighter and more consistent, instead I’m left wanting to paint a more impressionistic picture, using the same word or colour to mean different things in different contexts. As someone with a tendency to want to figure out the “one true and correct” explanation, I’m left slightly more open to the possibility that it’s in not really knowing that a lot of the interest and value lies.